Construals of agency in the testimony of Colin de Souza

Abstract:

In this paper, I analyse the testimony of Colin de Souza given before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in the mid-1990s.1 My aim is to explore how De Souza projects an identity of himself as 'agentive', as an innovative and flexible individual who is capable of outwitting and outmaneuvering his opponents despite the fact that within the TRC context, he is positioned as a 'victim' of human rights abuse. To substantiate this argument, I use a number of Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) tools to analyse the way in which this agency is encoded in the language of the testimony.

Citation:

Bock, Z. (2009). Construals of agency in the testimony of Colin de Souza. In S. Slembrouck, M. Taverniers and M Van Herreweghe (eds), From will to well: Studies in Linguistics offered to Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen. Ghent: Academia Press, 43-53